Odd John: another biography style story about super smart people

I just finished Odd John and it reminded me a bit of The Glass Bead Game in that it was a historical/biographical style telling of a group of super intelligent people who the rest of the world doesn’t understand. It was about ten times more entertaining, though that isn’t saying much. It was also written around the same time so maybe fictional biographies were a fad then.

This story was interesting, and gave me a lot of ideas to pirate. It follows the path of one character, John, from his birth to death. He starts out as a genius baby learning to read and speak and do complex math, physics and more all in his first years. From there, he moves on to even stranger/more amazing feats.

The end is what one might expect from a group of hyper smart people trying to start a colony. The world can never accept what it doesn’t understand. The author leaves it a bit vague what the group is trying to do with their collective smarts, but whatever it was, we normals would never have understood…

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Jonas David is a writer and editor at Lucent Dreaming magazine, and lives in the Seattle area. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, IGMS and others. Additional writing and info can be found at jonas-david.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @thejonasdavid.